I've seen several people complain about Sys-Con for various reasons. The most recent complaint is that they're selling old articles on Amazon without giving a dime of the proceeds to the original authors.
So, I thought I'd check it out. Here's what I found. I wrote an article on Lucene for JDJ a few years ago. They didn't pay me for it, but I was just happy to be published. No big deal, right?
At the time it wasn't such a huge deal, but now I'm a bit miffed that they're selling the article on Amazon for $5.95. What are the odds that I'll get any change for the soda machine from that?
Lesson learned: Pay careful attention to the contract when you sign up to write an article.
If you want to read my article for FREE, follow this link to read it from Sys-Con's site. If they eventually take it off of their site, let me know and I'll arrange to make an updated version of an article available (also for free). Or better yet, just go get Erik Hatcher's Lucene in Action. It's much better and much more up-to-date than my article.
